Thursday, April 27, 2017

Elephantine Ooze

It doesn't look like an ooze. It looks like a steam roller ran over an boneless, faceless elephant.

Grey lumps of shabby flesh, heaped around the room, draped over everything, as limp and as heavy as wet blankets. Featureless. Just dirty wrinkles of elephant skin.

There are a few scars. Some of the scars are stretched, distended, and faded. These are the scars that it got when it was very young, before its skin thickened.

Like all oozes, it's slow to rouse but creepingly determined when it does. It clings to ceilings, launches clumsy ambushes. When it falls on you its like someone throwing a pile of wet blankets on a puppy.

It doesn't crawl; it walks. It is a sack of muscles, and when it crawls it looks like a dozen deformed bodybuilders crawling under a blanket. You can see it flex and twitch, like a cow's flank without the cow. Even under two inches of elephant skin, you can see the huge muscles on this thing.

When it grabs you, it pulls you in. It's like being grabbed by a mosh pit. And once you are inside it, it quickly and methodically begins breaking all of your bones. It starts with the largest bones--usually your femurs--before moving on to the rest.

It seals itself around you, and keeps breaking you. Eventually, you become a broken pulp, which it pumps from chamber to chamber, through openings no larger than your fist. In the end, you are more liquid than it is.

Only then does it spend time regrowing its mouths. The mouths are small things, as small and as toothless as a baby's. And then it pumps you inside itself, and finally the acid finds you.

Crush -- It can grab any number of adjacent creatures. At the start of its turn, grabbed creatures automatically take 2d6 damage.

Thick Hide -- Half damage from slashing and bludgeoning.

Ooze -- Can compress itself under doors, etc.

Elephantine oozes always attack elephants, if there are any present. They will go out of their way to kill and digest an elephant.

Anyone who eats a piece of an Elephantine Ooze and fails a Con check will contract Elephantosis. Each day, their skin grows thicker, taking up an inventory slot and giving them +1 AC. This armor bonus stacks up to +6 AC and does not stack with any worn armor. When the disease is cured, the skin returns to normal at the same rate. There is a 50% chance that the last point of skin becomes permanent.

They hunt by stretching and grasping with their hammer-shaped faces. No one knows why their faces are described as such, apart from the elves, who are quite pleased with hammers that do not make loud noises and that are uniquely symmetrical. Giant flatworms have eyes like two small dimples, but most are blind. This is because they are too large to have a microscope to look up, and so stare at the sun instead. A giant flatworm without a sun to stare at will either imagine a sun, which blinds them, or they will imagine a microscope wielded by a being that would need one to view them properly. This makes them quite devout worshippers by most standards. Treat these worms as clerics, paladins or antipaladins depending on which god they imagine.

The gods are not real ones, but the worm has enough faith to worship nevertheless. They must complete a quest for atonement if they observe the sun or imagine a separate microscope. Being worms, atonement usually involves not being in the sun any more, as they are rarely imaginative enough to imagine these separate microscopes in the rirst place. If they do so, or are tricked into doing so, they will often come to bizarre conclusions of how to atone, such as attempting a pirouette. They do not seek assistance, for they are very patient.

The Celestial Buereaucracy thus offers a bounty on giant flatworms, as their sins are oddly shaped and very difficult to measure.

When a giant flatworm has found its food, it will attempt to wrap its face around it. It enjoys snails, and oligochaetes are a delicacy because of their violent squirming. They find other flatworms to be most delicious, however, as their lack of a body cavity it difficult to predicr which organs will dissolve first. Tetrapods are thus eaten much like how a prawn is not eaten- they will eat the delicious fleshy limbs, and discard the rest. Unfortunately, the other limbs melt bwfore the flatworm is finished eating, and so large quantities of meat are discarded. Some flatworms enjoy eating their own kind because their made up gods have convinced them that such bycatch is unsustainable, and they must figure out how to chop limbs off and eat them one at a time.

There is only one flatworm that has succeeded in this. However, each time it has decapitated itself, the flatworm that head grew into has shared the knowledge- thus, knife-wielding flatworms are a real and credible threat. They are all identical, and terrified of plagues.

When a flatworm has caught a meal, it will envelop it closely until the prey is mostly hidden. Once this is done, they will spit their mouths out of their bellies and stab the prey, to vomit up stomach acids inside. Their hammer-shaped heads act as flaps so the prey can be surrounded completely, which keeps the drippings inside while it drinks up the liquid meat. It finds snails very convenient to eat, because it can press the shell opening to the mouth on its belly and slurp up the meat without spilling. The shell is left very clean. They do not like turtles, because they can never seem to cover all six holes before the turtle melts.